Game Boy-style dithering: four greens, Bayer 4 × 4 and chunky pixels
This preset recreates the feel of an early handheld screen. The Game Boy-style palette maps your image onto four shades, from dark forest green to a yellowish pea green, while Bayer 4 × 4 ordered dithering fills the steps between them with the tidy checker patterns of old game art, at a blocky Pixel size of 4 under faint Scanlines at 20. It is a style homage: no official assets, and no affiliation with the console's maker.
Make it yours
Shrink the virtual screen
Pixel size 4 is a compromise. Go to 6 or 8 for a sprite-sized look on large images, and add a Vignette of around 20 to hint at an unevenly lit handheld display.
Get cleaner flat areas
Four shades leave little room for gradients, so busy photos can turn to green noise. Raise Contrast from 15 to about 35 to push regions toward solid shades, or lower Dither strength from 100 to 60 for flatter, poster-like fills.
FAQ
Why does the Game Boy-style look use Bayer dithering?
Ordered Bayer patterns resemble what pixel artists of that era drew by hand: regular checker fills that stay perfectly still and tile cleanly. Error diffusion would look more photographic and less like game art. The 4 × 4 matrix gives 16 threshold steps between each pair of greens, enough to suggest shading without breaking the pixel-art feel.
How it works
Upload an image
Add a PNG, JPG or WebP up to 20 MB and keep the original ratio or crop to 1:1, 4:5, 3:2, 16:9 or 9:16.
Choose a mode
ASCII with 8 character sets including Braille, Blocks, Binary, Matrix and your own characters; Dither with 14 algorithms; or Shapes with pixels, dots, lines and diamonds.
Style and use it
Set a palette such as 1-bit, Game Boy, Terminal or CGA, add scanlines, bloom or grain, then sign in with a free UX Pilot account to use it on the canvas or export it.